Some beasts be ordained for man’s mirth, as apes and marmosets and popinjays; and some be made for exercitation of man, for man should know his own infirmities and the might of God. And therefore be made flies and lice; and lions and tigers and bears be made that man may by the first know his own infirmity, and be afeard of the second. Also some beasts be made to relieve and help the need of many manner infirmities of mankind – as the flesh of the adder to make treacle.
Bartholomew (Berthelet),
Bartholomeus de Proprietatibus Rerum
I had been at Whipsnade a little over a year when I decided to leave. This was no hasty decision; I was still as determined as ever to go animal collecting and eventually to own my own zoo, but I knew that I would not be hastening the achievement of either ambition by staying any longer at Whipsnade. I could have stayed on indefinitely being odd-beast boy, but I had other plans.
At the age of twenty-one, a date that was not too far distant, I knew I was to inherit three thousand pounds – not a fortune, but in those days one could do a lot more with three thousand than one can today – so every evening in the cold, echoing confines of the bothy I would sit in my little cell-like room and write carefully-composed letters to all the animal collectors who were then functioning. I outlined my experience and then went on to say that if they would consider taking me on an expedition I would pay all my own expenses and work free. Eventually, back came the replies, courteous but definite. They appreciated my offer but as I had had no collecting experience it was impossible for them to consider taking me on a trip; if I could get some collecting experience, however, I was to approach them again. As my whole reason for wanting to go on an expedition was to gain experience, this argument was, to say the least, unhelpful. It was the egg and chicken all over again; they would not take me unless I had the experience and I could not get the experience unless they took me.
It was at that point in my life, depressed and frustrated, that I had a brilliant idea. If I used some of my inheritance to finance an expedition of my own then I could honestly claim to have had experience and then one of these great men might not only take me on an expedition but actually pay me a salary. The prospects were mouth-watering.
My decision to leave was greeted with disappointment. Phil Bates tried to persuade me to stay on, as did Captain Beale.
‘You’ll never get anywhere, Durrell, if you keep leaving like this,’ he grumbled aggrievedly at my farewell curry supper, as if I had made a habit of giving in my notice once a week during my time at Whipsnade. ‘You should stay on . . . give you a section of your own eventually . . . could lead to big things . . .’
‘It’s very kind of you, sir, but I’ve got my heart set on going collecting.’
‘No money in it,’ said the captain dolefully. ‘You’ll be chuckin’ money away, mark my words.’
‘Don’t depress the boy, William,’ said Mrs Beale. ‘I’m sure he’ll make a success of it.’
‘Fiddy faddy!’ said the captain glumly. ‘Nobody ever made money collecting.’
‘What about Hagenbeck, sir?’ I inquired.
‘Those were the good old days,’ said the captain. ‘Money was money then . . . gold sovereigns you could dig your teeth into . . . not a lot of useless lavatory paper like we’ve got now.’
‘William, dear!’
‘Well, it’s true,’ said the captain truculently. ‘In those days money was worth money. Now it’s a lot of loo paper.’
‘William!’
‘Anyway, come back and see us, won’t you?’ said the captain. ‘Yes, you must,’ said Mrs Beale. ‘We shall miss you.’
‘I’ll earmark all the best animals in my collection for you, sir,’ I said.
As I lay in bed on my last night at Whipsnade I tried to assess how important my being at Whipsnade had been to me. What had I learnt?
It seemed to be mostly negative. True, I had learnt the best way to cany a bale of hay on a pitchfork, how to use a besom and spade for cleaning out, and the fact that a docile-looking wallaby could, when cornered, jump at you, slash down with its hind feet and rip the front off an extremely tough mackintosh; but it seemed that it was the ‘how not to’ I had learnt that was important.
I had, however, come to realise that one of the most vital things in a zoological garden was the keepering staff. Without them nothing is achieved, so, therefore, it is of the utmost importance to give status to a hard and dirty job and, what is more important, to pick these people carefully. The keepering staff at Whipsnade when I was there were, in the main, farm labourers who had been employed originally to put up the great perimeter fence and the paddock fencing. The result was that I found myself working with men of forty and fifty who did not know as much about the animals in their care as I did at twenty. This was not their fault; they had no desire to be zoological experts. As far as they were concerned it was just a job of work and they did it as efficiently as they could but with an almost total lack of interest. This was brought home to me very forcibly my first day on the giraffe section.
At about four o’clock Bert had instructed me to light a fire under a great cauldron of water and this I had dutifully done. When it was boiling he carefully mixed hot and cold water together to make a couple of buckets of tepid water and then told me that we were going to give the giraffe his drink. As I watched the giraffe gulping down the water I asked Bert why it was necessary for its drinking water to be warm.
‘Dunno, boy,’ said Bert. ‘When ’e came they told me to give ’im ’ot water . . . dunno why.’
Careful inquiry on my part solved the mystery. Six or seven years before, when the giraffe had first arrived, it had developed a chill; it was thought that warm water would be more soothing to drink than cold and so instructions were given – but never countermanded. The result was that the giraffe had been drinking hot water for seven years quite unnecessarily. Bert, who was very fond and proud of his animals, had nevertheless lacked sufficient interest to find out if warm water was essential to the giraffe’s welfare.
Lack of interest or lack of knowledge breeds lack of observation, and of all the qualifications needed when looking after wild animals this is the most important. Wild animals are past masters at concealing the fact that they are ill, for example, so that unless you know your creatures intimately and observe them most carefully you will miss the tiny signs that tell you what is going on.
Another point which became very obvious to me at Whipsnade was that the idea that an animal was happier, and therefore lived better, in a larger cage or enclosure than a small one was totally erroneous. ‘I don’t mind zoos if they’re like Whipsnade,’ was the remark that was so frequently made by those well-meaning and ignorant animal lovers that I met. The answer was, of course: ‘You should have worked there – and experienced the difficulty of trying to keep a close daily check on a herd of animals in a thirty-five-acre paddock, making sure they were developing no illness, that some of them were not being bullied to starvation level by others, and that the whole group was getting enough to eat.’
If anything went wrong and you had to catch up an individual member of the herd you would have to pursue it round thirty-five acres and when you had finally caught it – you hoped, without its dying of heart failure or breaking a leg – you had to treat it not only for whatever was wrong with it but for acute shock as well. Nowadays, of course, things are made much easier by the use of such refinements as dart guns but in the days when I worked at Whipsnade the size of the paddock was ultimately detrimental to the animals.
The only useful function they fulfilled was as a salve to the anthropomorphic souls of those animal lovers who did not like to see animals imprisoned. Unfortunately, this attitude towards zoos is still rife among the well-intentioned but basically ignorant who insist on talking about Mother Nature as though she were a benevolent old lady instead of the harsh, unyielding and totally rapacious monster that she is.
It is hard to argue with these people; they live in a euphoric state where they believe that an animal in a zoo suffers as though it were in Dartmoor and an animal in its natural surroundings is living in a Garden of Eden where the lamb can lie down with the lion without starting in friendship and ending up as dinner. It is useless to point out the ceaseless drudgery of finding adequate food supplies each day in the wilds, of the constant strain on the nerves of avoiding enemies, of the battle against disease and parasites, of the fact that in some species there is more than a fifty per cent mortality rate among the young in the first six months. ‘Ah,’ these bemused animal lovers will say when these things are pointed out to them, ‘but they are free!’ You point out that animals have strict territories that are governed by three things: food, water and sex. Provide all these successfully within a limited area and the animal will stay there. But people seem to be obsessed with this word ‘freedom’, particularly when applied to animals. They never seem to worry about the freedom of the bank clerks of Streatham, the miners of Durham, the factory hands of Sheffield, the carpenters of Hartley Wintney, or the head waiters of Soho, yet if a careful survey were conducted on these and other similar species you would find that they are confined by their jobs and by convention as securely as any zoo inmate.
The following morning I went the rounds saying goodbye to the animals and men. I was sad, for I had been happy working at Whipsnade but, as I went round, each animal represented a place I wanted to see, each was a sort of geographical signpost encouraging me on my way. Peter the Wombat, noisily devouring a final bag of peanuts from me, represented the topsy-turvy continent of Australia with its strange red deserts and its stranger fauna, a fauna that leaped and bounced, mammals that laid eggs like birds, and similar wonders that I must witness. The tigers Paul and Maurena, accepting a farewell egg, their hides glowing a sunset-orange, were Asia – bejewelled elephants, great armoured rhinoceroses, and the gleaming bespangled ramparts of the Himalayas alive with wild sheep. Babs and Sam the polar bears, hissing delightedly over their ice-creams, spoke to me of jagged milk-white snow fields and a deep, cold sea as blue and as un-comforting as a crow’s wing. The dazzling black and white zebras and old Albert wrapped in his tangled mane were Africa, the dark continent, its shiny green and moist forests sheltering the massive gorilla, its savannas shaking under the impact of a million galloping hooves, its lakes a rose garden of pink flamingos.
Everywhere, the animals beckoned me and strengthened my decision. As I stuffed bananas under the rubbery noses of the tapirs and slapped their fat rumps for the last time, I thought of visiting their South American homeland – huge trees bejewelled with sprite-like marmosets, and great slow rivers, coffee-brown, their waters full of razor-toothed fish and placid turtles. There were so many places to go and so many animals to see that I was flooded with impatience. The brown bears and the wolves represented the whispering northern forests; Peter the giraffe, in his latticework coat, beckoned me to the fawn-coloured plains of Africa, grass as crisp as a biscuit underfoot, shaded by the strange topiary of acacias, while the shaggy-shouldered buffalo lured me to the great sweeping undulations of the North American prairies.
The men I had worked with took my news in various ways.
‘Remember what I learnt you, boy,’ said Jesse, sucking his teeth and glaring at me. ‘And watch out. It’s one thing to have a lion in a cage and another to have the bugger creeping up behind you, see? You watch it, boy.’
‘I don’t know how you can do it,’ said Joe, pursing his lips and shaking his head. ‘I couldn’t not if you was to offer me a hundred pounds I couldn’t. But do as Jesse says and watch it.’
‘Off to Africa, are we?’ said Mr Coles. ‘Quite the little explorer then.’
‘Goodbye, boy,’ said old Tom, enveloping my hand in both his fat, red, chilblain-encrusted ones and squeezing it. ‘Send us a postcard, won’t you? Take care of yourself.’
‘Good luck, boy,’ said Harry, his eyes twinkling. ‘Not that you need it – I know you’ll be all right. Why, you can run near as fast as I can when anything comes for you. You’ll be O.K.’
‘Goodbye, lad,’ said Bert, ducking under the giraffe’s great neck to shake my hand, adding, as though I were geting married, ‘I hope you’ll be very happy.’
‘If you want any help, just drop us a line,’ said Phil Bates, his brown face earnest. ‘I’m sure the captain will always help you, and if you ever want to come back, well, I’m sure we can manage something.’
He beamed at me, shook my hand, and then wandered off whistling tunelessly through the green woods asparkle with a treasure of daffodils, the wallabies and the peacocks moving slowly, unconcernedly, out of his way.
I picked up my suitcase and made my way out of the park.